Back to basics introduction to the differential amplifier, aka the diff-pair, long-tailed pair, emitter coupled pair, etc. The basic operation of the circuit is presented, along with a simple mechanical simulation. Also, how the addition of current sources and mirrors can be used to address some of the performance issues, and begin to form the rudimentary beginnings of an op amp. This is the follow-up video from “teaser” video published earlier.

Every year I notice that I have little issue waking up at 7am during summer months, yet waking up at 8am during winter is always unpleasant. Some quick research led me to find that the body is gradually woken up by light, which is why products such as the Phillips Wake-Up Light exist. However, with a starting price of £60 for the (very) basic version, I’ve opted to make my own smartphone-connected, automated wake up light instead.

I recently bumped into NodeMCU firmware for the ESP8266. It’s an Lua interpreter, making tinkering with IoT ideas really simple. Just flash the firmware onto the ESP8266 and connect via serial console. You can start prototyping right away using the interactive Lua interpreter. You can easily persist your ideas on a simple flash file system.

DuWayne (KV4QB) has done something very cool here. He’s taken an Arduino Nano, a cheap AD9850 DDS board, a small screen, and a couple of log detectors, and he has built IN AN ALTOIDS TIN a scalar network analyzer that lets you see the bandpass of a filter. (We posted an earlier version of this here: http://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2015/01/duwaynes-ad9850-arduino-tft-swr-scanner.html ) Wow. I’ve been doing this by hand, changing the input freq at 100Hz increments, measuring the output, putting the results into a spread sheet, converting to log (db), creating a graph… DuWayne makes it a lot easier. DuWayne is being encouraged to write up the results, possibly for QRP Quarterly.

For many of my previous projects I used AVR Microcontrollers extensively. I started with the Atmega8 and moved to superior AVR variants depending on the application complexity and requirements. Before designing any particular application, I usually do my research on a development board. It is a PCB featuring the target microcontroller and minimal support logic that usually covers a regulated power supply, pin headers to connect peripherals and/or a few LEDs used for basic debugging.

Such boards are available in many shapes and colours, from simple to complex and most of the times they are affordable (after all we’re talking about a minimal PCB with a microcontroller and a few, mostly passive, components).

The design is small scale mobile robot. The robot has two wheels that optimizes direction control and rotation. It is simple and low cost compared to other robotic designs. It is accurate and reliable with three sensors, which accuracy can still be increased with additional sensor pair.

The circuit is comprised of an Arduino Uno microcontroller, which serves as the main board of the system. It handles the complete integration of the system. The distance sensors serves as the eyes of the robot, which are three pairs for accuracy and faster obstacle sensing. The motors drives the two wheels independently, each has its own wheel to drive. The transistors that is connected to the motor are used as a switch of the motor as the microcontroller releases the signal.

This simple design of mobile robot is helpful in order to developed our own version of mobile robot. It is an efficient and helpful concept in developing a robot that can roam around especially without the need of human control. It is suitable to different applications like gathering data, search and rescue, safety measures, and other related stuffs that needs support at a very rigid situation.

Have you ever been curious about the power consumption of an appliance? For example did you wonder how much it will cost you to leave your television in standby mode whole night? Or did you want to learn how much change your refrigerator settings will make on your electric bill? If your answer is yes, you can use a wattmeter to measure the power consumption of a device. In this project we are building one.

This is an AC Watt Meter which can measure the real power consumption of a device connected to the 230Vrms/50Hz mains line. The PIC microcontroller collects the voltage and the current information with the help of ADCs and then calculates the RMS voltage of the mains line, RMS current drawn by the device and the resulting average power consumption. All these information is then displayed on the dot matrix LCD.

The MicroGame is an experiment of making a custom portable platform for gamming compatible with Arduino. It’s based on a small monochrome 128×64 pixels OLED from Adafruit and a ATmega32U4 8-bits microcontroller running at 8MHz. All hardware design and game source code is writed from scratch by me and you can find all the files in my Github repository if you want to build your own. You can modify, share and make improvements as you like but do not forget to shoot me and email and show me your work!

For those of you who remember the eighties, this will no doubt bring back fond memories when every piece of audio equipment in the known universe was at the time equipped with a plethora of LEDs.

More specifically the ubiquitous Graphic Equaliser or ‘Graphic EQ’.

This Instructable is centred around the MSGEQ7 to create a simple 2 Channel Graphic EQ and documents my first, poor attempt at using the Arduino Uno R3, the Arduino development environment and coding in ‘C’ for well over a decade.

ARM has unveiled the new ARM Cortex-A72 processor which they expect to be the standard SoC in mobile devices hitting the marketplace in 2016. Their claim is that it is the highest performing CPU technology available for developing mobile SoCs today. In target configurations, the Cortex-A72 processor is said to deliver CPU performance 50X greater than the leading smartphones from just five years ago.

The ARM premium mobile experience IP suite also offers a significant graphics upgrade offering users up to 4K120fps resolution. Alongside the Cortex-A72 processor is the new CoreLink CCI-500 interconnect and the new Mali-T880 GPU, ARM’s highest performing and most energy-efficient mobile GPU, along with Mali-V550 video and Mali-DP550 display processors. To further ease chip implementation, the suite also includes ARM POP IP for the leading-edge TSMC 16nm FinFET+ process.